Abstract
It was perhaps inevitable that after the Second World War, as after the war of 1914–18, there should appear in the United States a school of historians questioning the purposes of the war and the motives of the wartime statesmen. The cost of both world wars, in human lives and in physical resources, was very high; and it was only natural that some individuals should question such expenditure. Yet the new school of ‘revisionism’ appearing after the Second World War has undertaken a line of investigation which, if successful, will force the rewriting of an entire era in American history. The revisionists hope to prove that in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt purposely exposed the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and goaded the Japanese into attacking it, thus bringing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. As Professor Harry Elmer Barnes has put the case, in rather plain English, ‘The net result of revisionist scholarship applied to Pearl Harbor boils down essentially to this: In order to promote Roosevelt’s political ambitions and his mendacious foreign policy some three thousand American boys were quite needlessly butchered….’1
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Notes
‘Of course, they were only a drop in the bucket compared to those who were ultimately slain in the war that resulted, which was as needless, in terms of vital American interests, as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.’ H. E. Barnes (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, 1953) ch. io, ‘Summary and Conclusions’, p. 651.
See also George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York, 1947);
Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (New Haven, 1948).
There is a trenchant criticism of the Morgenstern book in Samuel Flagg Bemis’s ‘First Gun of a Revisionist Historiography for the Second World War’, Journal of Modern History, XIX (March 1947) 55–9.
For an adverse view of Beard’s book, see Samuel Eliot Morison, By Land and By Sea (New York, 1953) ch. 15, ‘History through a Beard’. pp. 328–45.
Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War (Chicago, 1952).
See the letter by Samuel Flagg Bemis to the editor of the Journal of Modern History, XXVI (June 1954) 206.
Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (39 vols, Washington, 1946); Report on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (Washington, 1946). The archives of the Department of State, with certain restrictions, are open to qualified scholars for all material up to the date of 7 Dec 1941. The Grew papers and diary are open to students upon application to the curator of manuscripts of the Houghton Library at Harvard. Herbert Feis in his Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton, 1950)
and Professors William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason in their The Undeclared War: 1940–41 (New York, 1953) have used the Stimson and Morgenthau diaries. The Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park are available to the public, and are under the administration of the National Archives. Frederic R. Sanborn in his essay in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace dwells on the inaccessibility of the wartime Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence, some 1700 missives which have been ‘kept secret to this day’. Historians, of course, would like to see such material. Yet the practices of opening archives, public and personal, at least in the United States, have been extraordinarily liberal in recent years. If the most private correspondence of statesmen is to be published within a decade or so of its writing, there is no question but that statesmen in the future will feel themselves severely circumscribed in communicating with each other. The result, indeed, has already been a severe deterioration of communication through regular diplomatic channels, for diplomats and their superiors no longer can be certain as to the confidential handling of their dispatches. The Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence beyond doubt would contain a considerable amount of day-to-day speculation and wonderment, which, if taken out of context by inexperienced or unfriendly readers, would look very compromising.
A frequently cited remark in proof of a Roose-veltian conspiracy is a certain passage in the diary of Secretary of War Stimson. At a White House meeting in November 1941 Stimson had said that it was all a matter of ‘how we should manoeuvre them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot’. A peacefuly inclined democracy, as Stimson well knew, was at great disadvantage when it had to await a blow by an aggressor. Washington leaders in late November 1941 knew that Japan was planning a large-scale aggressive military movement in the Far East, and everyone supposed that the Japanese would be intelligent enough to move on Siam, or perhaps Malaya or the Dutch East Indies, but not American territory — thus avoiding an open casus belli with the United States and, in view of the divided state of public opinion at the time, making it extremely difficult for the Roosevelt administration to convince the country that vital American interests were imperilled. Stimson hoped that, somehow, perhaps by presidential announcement, Japan (and the American people) could be informed that the then-impending Japanese move would traverse vital American interests; that the move could then be made to appear as a case of ‘firing the first shot’; and that the president could thereby go before Congress and ask for war. See Richard N. Current, ‘How Stimson Meant to “Maneuver” the Japanese’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XL (June 1953) 67–74. The revisionists have certainly not been fair to Secretary Stimson in the interpretations put upon this ‘manoeuvre’ statement since the time when it first appeared in the record of the congressional investigation of 1945–6. Stimson usually recorded from four to ten doublespace typescript pages of diary each day, dictating the previous day’s occurrences into a machine on the following morning while shaving.
See the testimony of Major-General Sherman Miles, head of army intelligence in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, in his ‘Pearl Harbor in Retrospect’, Atlantic Monthly, CLXXXII (July 1948) 65–72.
Rear-Admiral Theodore Stark Wilkinson, director of naval intelligence, likewise minimised the possibility of a Hawaii attack: S. E. Morison, Rising Sun in the Pacific (Boston, 1948) pp. 134–5. See also Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War: 1940–41, chs 27, 28.
Even Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1948), who state firmly a belief in the negligence of Kimmel and Short, admit that the men in Washington did not foresee the attack at Pearl Harbor and were astonished by it (pp. 389–93).
For Stimson’s surprise at the attack, and his subsequent reactions in the matter of responsibility, see Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick, N.J., 1954) ch. 8, ‘The Old Army Game’.
Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, passim. See also Cordell Hull, Memoirs (2 vols, New York, 1948) II 982–1037, 1054–1105.
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Ferrell, R.H. (1971). Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists. In: Robertson, E.M. (eds) The Origins of the Second World War. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15416-6_14
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